AFTER HOURS - Prima Donna (Acetate)
Knowing where to steal has always been every great artist’s dirty little secret ever since a certain strain of Heidelberg man began banging on a garbage can with the skull bone of a chimpanzee, but there’s no shame in laying all your cards out on the table face up either.

Prima Donna’s “After Hours” welds the New York Dolls’ medulla to Mott the Hoople’s oblongata with blowzy, squonking saxophone, bursting out of anonymity in a rush of static, dirty noise and bash and clatter with 10 two and three-minute rave-ups full of raggedy chonk, curdled romance, and girls who go bump in the night that make their points and scram. The songs, that is, not the girls. If these guys continue to pour on the pomp, circumstance, strut, and preen, something tells me the women are there to stay.

And you can dance to every blessed minute of it.

For those of us who pine for the days when records listed for $4.98, “Soul Stripper,” “Demoted,” “Stray Doll,” and “Dummy Luv” are welcome breaks from ambulance-chasing snobs smitten by twee indie pop, money-mad opportunists willing to roll over and play dead for the sake of airplay, mass adulation, or big coin while exhibiting all the emotional intensity of a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake.

This is good, clean uncluttered fun, scruffy, unrehearsed fuzz-busting pop stripped down to the archetypal sound of two or three guitars, bass, drums, drunken singalong hooks, and handclaps, all well-oiled parts of a perpetual motion machine gone somewhat daft of purpose from a bunch of slouching, drowsy Hollywood throwbacks that, depending on how you hold it up to the light, is either simple minded, underachieving, or joyous.

These guys should be someone’s heroes by now. With their own cartoon show and everything. - Clark Paull1/4